Duane Reade recently introduced a new reward points system, and since I’m pretty certain that I am the only one who pays attention to this kind of thing, I feel the need to explore this topic a bit.

The old system was based on a 5+% reimbursement rate. Each dollar spent was a point, and 100 points was a $5 coupon, plus they round your cents up to the next dollar when computing points earned on a purchase (hence the +). However, given that coupons expired after two weeks, could not be used on the day they were earned, and were printed at the end of your receipt (making them especially likely to become lost or forgotten), it’s understood that the impact of rewards on DR’s bottom line was, in practice, way less than 5%.

Now, customers were not terribly happy with this scheme, in that they were constantly failing to redeem their hard-earned $5 coupons. So last week DR replaced their old rewards system with FlexRewards, which appeases customers by eliminating paper rebates and expiration dates^*. Furthermore, they doubled the amount of points earned on purchases; two points per dollar spent is the new rate, plus the same rounding rule for change. On its face, that seems like a very pro-consumer move, and is certainly being promoted by DR as such. Not so much when you take into account another less well-advertised change: it now takes 500 points to earn a $5 coupon. So your new base reimbursement rate is 2+%, or just 2/5ths of the previous rate^†.

So, unless you were failing to use 3 or more out of every 5 coupons you earned previously, you are probably making out worse under the new FlexRewards system. Duane Reade is keeping more of your money and acting like you’re getting the better end of the deal. But at least you don’t have to carry around little receipt tear-offs anymore.

^*Technically you have to buy something every 6 months to keep your points from expiring.
^†They also now award bonus (SuperSaver) points for accumulating rewards without exchanging them, but even at the highest bonus tier the reimbursement rate works out to something like 2.6+%.

I love this short essay by Penn Jillette, because it’s such a beautiful distillation of my core beliefs. I simply could not have said it any better than this:

I believe that there is no God. I’m beyond atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy — you can’t prove a negative, so there’s no work to do. You can’t prove that there isn’t an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word “elephant” includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire?

So, anyone with a love for truth outside of herself has to start with no belief in God and then look for evidence of God. She needs to search for some objective evidence of a supernatural power. All the people I write e-mails to often are still stuck at this searching stage. The atheism part is easy.

But, this “This I Believe” thing seems to demand something more personal, some leap of faith that helps one see life’s big picture, some rules to live by. So, I’m saying, “This I believe: I believe there is no God.”

Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I’m not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it’s everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I’m raising now is enough that I don’t need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.

Believing there’s no God means I can’t really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That’s good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.

Believing there’s no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I’m wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don’t travel in circles where people say, “I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.” That’s just a long-winded religious way to say, “shut up,” or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscenity is less insulting than, “How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do.” So, believing there is no God lets me be proven wrong and that’s always fun. It means I’m learning something.

Believing there is no God means the suffering I’ve seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn’t caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn’t bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.

Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.

- Penn Jillette for NPR’s ‘This I Believe’